Webmaster's Note
In these trying times, it is interesting to read this article that was written as another president led
the USA into war. Randolph Bourne's articles appeared in a magazine, The Seven Arts. Two of his essays,
The War and the Intellectuals and War is the Health of the State appear on this site. I
hope that these may prompt a new generation's student to pursue further research into the brief life and
ideas of a man who, as Dos Passos wrote, does indeed have a ghost.

Stewart Ogilby
Sarasota, FL

The War and the Intellectuals

To those of us who still retain an irreconcilable animus against war, it
has been a bitter experience to see the unanimity with which the American
intellectuals have thrown their support to the use of war-technique in the
crisis in which America found herself. Socialists, college professors,
publicists, new-republicans, practitioners of literature, have vied with
each other in confirming with their intellectual faith the collapse of
neutrality and the riveting of the war-mind on a hundred million more of
the world's people. And the intellectuals are not content with confirming
our belligerent gesture. They are now complacently asserting that it was they
who effectively willed it, against the hesitation and dim perceptions of
the American democratic masses. A war made deliberately by the intellectuals!
A calm moral verdict, arrived at after a penetrating study of inexorable
facts! Sluggish masses, too remote from the world-conflict to be stirred,
too lacking in intellect to perceive their danger! An alert intellectual
class, saving the people in spite of themselves, biding their time with
Fabian strategy until the nation could be moved into war without serious
resistance! An intellectual class, gently guiding a nation through sheer
force of ideas into what the other nations entered only through predatory
craft or popular hysteria or militarist madness! A war free from any taint
of self-seeking, a war that will secure the triumph of democracy and
internationalize the world! This is the picture which the more self-conscious
intellectuals have formed of themselves, and which they are slowly impressing
upon a population which is being led no man knows whither by an indubitably
intellectualized President. And they are right, in that the war certainly
did not spring from hysterias, of the American people, however acquiescent
the masses prove to be, and however clearly the intellectuals prove their
putative intuition.

Those intellectuals who have felt themselves totally out of sympathy with
this drag toward war will seek some explanation for this joyful leadership.
They will want to understand this willingness of the American intellect to
open the sluices and flood us with the sewage of the war spirit. We cannot
forget the virtuous horror and stupefaction which filled our college
professors when they read the famous manifesto the their ninety-three
German colleagues in defense of their war.1 To the
American academic mind of 1914 defense of war was inconceivable. From
Bernhardi2 it recoiled as from blasphemy, little
dreaming that two years later would find it creating its own cleanly
reasons for imposing military service on the country and for talking
of the rough rude currents of health and regeneration that war would send
through the American body politic. They would have thought anyone mad who
talked of shipping American men by the hundreds of thousands - conscripts -
to die on the fields of France. Such a spiritual change seems catastrophic
when we shoot our minds back to those days when neutrality was a proud
thing. But the intellectual progress has been so gradual that the country
retains little sense of the irony. The war sentiment, begun so gradually
but so perseveringly by the preparedness advocates who come from the ranks
of big business, caught hold of one after another of the intellectual
groups. With the aid of Roosevelt, the murmurs became a monotonous chant,
and finally a chorus so mighty that to be out of it was at first to be
disreputable and finally almost obscene. And slowly a strident rant was
worked up against Germany which compared very creditably with the German
fulminations against the greedy power of England. The nerve of the war-feeling
centered, of course, in the richer and older clases of the Atlantic
seaboard, and was keenest where there were French or English business and
particularly social connections. The sentiment then spread over the country
as a class-phenomenon, touching everywhere those upper-class elements in
each section who indentified themselves with this Eastern ruling group. It
must never be forgotten that in every community it was the least liberal
and least democratic elements among whom the preparedness and later the war
sentiment was found. The farmers were apathetic, the small business men and
workingmen are still apathetic towards the war. The election was a vote of
confidence of these latter classes in a President who would keep the faith
of neutrality.3 The intellectuals, in other words, have
identified themselves with the least democratic forces in American life.
They have assumed the leadership for war of those very classes whom the
American democracy has been immemorially fighting. Only in a world where
irony was dead could an intellectual class enter war at the head of such
illiberal cohorts in the avowed cause of world-liberalism and world-democracy.
No one is left to point out the undemocratic nature of this war-liberalism.
In a time of faith, skepticism is the most intolerable of all insults.

Our intellectual class might have been occupied, during the last two years
of war, in studying and clarifying the ideals and aspirations of the American
democracy, in discovering a true Americanism which would not have been
merely nebulous but might have federated the different ethnic groups and
traditions. They might have spent the time in endeavoring to clear the public
mind of the cant of war, to get rid of old mystical notions that clog our
thinking. We might have used the time for a great wave of education, for
setting our house in spiritual order. We could at least have set the problem
before ourselves. If our intellectuals were going to lead the administration,
they might conceivably have tried to find some way of securing peace by making
neutrality effective. They might have turned their intellectual energy not
to the problem of jockeying the nation into war, but to the problem of
using our vast neutral power to attain democratic ends for the rest of the
world and ourselves without the use of the malevolent technique of war.
They might have failed. The point is that they scarcely tried. The time was
spent not in clarification and education, but in mulling over nebulous ideals
of democracy and liberalism and civilization which had never meant anything
fruitful to those ruling classes who now so glibly used them, and in giving
free rein to the elementary instinct of self-defense. The whole era has been
spiritually wasted. The outstanding feature has been not its Americanism
but its intense colonialism. The offence of our intellectuals was not so
much that they were colonial - for what could we expect of a nation composed
of so many national elements? - but that it was so one-sidedly and partisanly
colonial. The official, reputable expression of the intellectual class has
been that of the English colonial. Centain portions of it have been even more
loyalist than the King, more British even than Australia. Other colonial
attitudes have been vulgar. The colonialism of the other American stocks
was denied a hearing from the start. America might have been made a meeting-ground
for the different national attitudes. An intellectual class, cultural colonists
of the different European nations, might have threshed out the issues here
as they could not be threshed out in Europe. Instead of this, the English
colonials in university and press took command at the start, and we became
an intellectual Hungary where thought was subject to an effective process
of Magyarization. The reputable opinion of the American intellectuals
became more and more either what could be read pleasantly in London, or
what was written in an earnest effort to put Englishmen straight on their
war-aims and war-technique. This Magyarization of thought produced as a
counter-reaction a peculiarly offensive and inept German apologetic, and
the two partisans divided the field between them. The great masses, the
other ethnic groups, were inarticulate. American public opinion was almost
as little prepared for war in 1917 as it was in 1914.

The sterile results of such an intellectual policy are inevitable. During the
war the American intellectual class has produced almost nothing in the way
of original and illuminating interpretation. Veblen's "Imperial Germany;"
Patten's "Culture and War," and addresses; Dewey's "German Philosophy and
Politics;" a chapter or two in Weyl's "American Foreign Policies;" - is
there much else of creative value in the intellectual repercussion of the
war? It is true that the shock of war put the American intellectual to an
unusual strain. He had to sit idle and think as spectator not as actor.
There was no government to which he could docily and loyally tender his mind
as did the Oxford professors to justify England in her own eyes. The
American's training was such as to make the fact of war almost incredible.
Both in his reading of history and in his lack of economic perspective he
was badly prepared for it. He had to explain to himself something which was
too colossal for the modern mind, which outran any language or terms which
we had to interpret it in. He had to explain his sympathies to the
breaking-point, while pulling the past and present into some sort of
interpretative order. The intellectuals in the fighting countries had only
to rationalize and justify what their country was already doing. Their task
was easy. A neutral, however, had really to search out the truth. Perhaps
perspective was too much to ask of any mind. Certainly the older colonials
among our college professors let their prejudices at once dictate their
thought. They have been comfortable ever since. The war has taught them
nothing and will teach them nothing. And they have had the satisfaction,
under the rigor of events, of seeing prejudice submerge the intellects of their
younger colleagues. And they have lived to see almost their entire class,
pacifists and democrats too, join them as apologists for the "gigantic
irrelevance" of war.

We had had to watch, therefore, in this country the same process which so
shocked us abroad - the coalescence of the intellectual classes in support
of the military programme. In this country, indeed, the socialist intellectuals
did not even have the grace of their German brothers and wait for the
declaration of war before they broke for cover. And when they declared for
war they showed how thin was the intellectual veneer of their socialism. For
they called us in terms that might have emanated from any bourgeois journal
to defend democracy and civilization, just as if it was not exactly against
those very bourgeois democracies and capitalist civilizations that socialists
had been fighting for decades. But so subtle is the spiritual chemistry of the
"inside" that all this intellectual cohesion - herd-instinct - which seemed
abroad so hysterical and so servile, comes to us here in highly rational
terms. We go to war to save the world from subjugation! But the German
intellectuals went to war to save their culture from barbarization! And
the French to save international honor! And Russia, most altruistic and
self-sacrificing of all, to save a small State from destruction! Whence is
our miraculous intuition of our moral spotlessness? Whence our confidence
that history will not unravel huge economic and imperialist forces upon which
our rationalizations float like bubbles? The Jew often marvels that his race
alone should have been chosen as the true people of the cosmic God. Are not
our intellectuals equally fatuous when they tell us that our war of all
wars is stainless and thrillingly achieving for good?

An intellectual class that was wholly rational would have called insistently
for peace and not for war. For months the crying need has been for a negotiated
peace, in order to avoid the ruin of a deadlock. Would not the same amount
of resolute statesmanship thrown into intervention have secured a peace that
would have been a subjugation for neither side? Was the terrific bargaining
power of a great neutral ever really used? Our war followed, as all wars
follow, a monstrous failure of diplomacy. Shamefacedness should now be our
intellectuals' attitude, because the American play for peace was made so
little more than a polite play. The intellectuals have still to explain why,
willing as they now are to use force to continue the war to absolute
exhaustion, they were not willing to use force to coerce the world to a
speedy peace.

Their forward vision is no more convincing than their past rationality. We
go to war now to internationalize the world! But surely their league to
Enforce Peace4 is only a palpable apocalyptic myth,
like the syndicalists' myth of the "general strike." It is not a rational
programme so much as a glowing symbol for the purpose of focusing belief,
of setting enthusiasm on fire for international order. As far as it does
this it has pragmatic value, but as far as it provides a certain radiant
mirage of idealism for this war and for a world-order founded on mutual
fear, it is dangerous and obnoxious. Idealism should be kept for what is
ideal. It is depressing to think that the prospect of a world so strong
that none dare challenge it should be the immediate prospect of the
American intellectual. If the League is only a makeshift, a coalition into
which we enter to restore order, then it is only a description of an
existing fact, and the idea should be treated as such. But if it is an
actually prospective outcome of the settlement, the keystone of American
policy, it is neither realizable nor desirable. For the programme of such
a League contains no provision for dynamic national growth or for international
economic justice. In a world which requires recognition of economic
internationalism far more than of political internationalism, an idea is
reactionary which proposes to petrify and federate the nations as political
and economic units. Such a scheme for international order is a dubious
justification for American policy. And if American policy had been sincere
in its belief that our participation would achieve international beatitude,
would we not have made our entrance into the war conditional upon a solemn
general agreement to respect in the final settlement these principles of
international order? Could we have afforded, if our war was to end war by
the establishment of a league of honor, to risk the defeat of our vision
and our betrayal in the settlement? Yet we are in the war, and no such
solemn agreement was made, nor has it even been suggested.

The case of the intellectuals seems, therefore, only very speciously rational.
They could have used their energy to force a just peace or at least to devise
other means than war for carrying through American policy. They could have
used their intellectual energy to ensure that our participation in the war
meant the international order which they wish. Intellect was not so used. It
was used to lead an apathetic nation into an irresponsible war, without
guarantees from those belligerents whose cause we were saving. The American
intellectual, therefore has been rational neither in his hindsight, nor his
foresight. To explain him we must look beneath the intellectual reasons to
the emotional disposition. It is not so much what they thought as how they
felt that explains our intellectual class. Allowing for colonial sympathy,
there was still the personal shock in a world-war which outraged all our
preconceived notions of the way the world was tending. It reduced to rubbish
most of the humanitarian internationalism and democratic nationalism which
had been the emotional thread of our intellectuals' life. We had suddenly to
make a new orientation. There were mental conflicts. Our latent colonialism
strove with our longing for American unity. Our desire for peace strove with
our desire for national responsibility in the world. That first lofty and
remote and not altogether unsound feeling of our spiritual isolation from
the conflict could not last. There was the itch to be in the great experience
which the rest of the world was having. Numbers of intelligent people who
had never been stirred by the horrors of capitalistic peace at home were
shaken out of their slumber by the horrors of war in Belgium. Never having
felt responsibility for labor wars and oppressed masses and excluded races
at home, they had a large fund of idle emotional capital to invest in the
oppressed nationalities and ravaged villages of Europe. Hearts that had felt
only the ugly contempt for democratic strivings at home beat in tune with
the struggle for freedom abroad. All this was natural, but it tended to
over-emphasize our responsibility. And it threw our thinking out of gear.
The task of making our own country detailedly fit for peace was abandoned
in favor of a feverish concern for the management of war, advice to the
fighting governments on all matters, military, social and political, and a
gradual working up of the conviction that we were ordained as a nation to
lead all erring brothers towards the light of liberty and democracy. The
failure of the American intellectual class to erect a creative attitude
toward the war can be explained by these sterile mental conflicts which the
shock to our ideals sent raging through us.

Mental conflicts end either in a new and higher synthesis or adjustment, or
else in a reversion to more primative ideas which have been outgrown but to
which we drop when jolted out of our attained position. The war caused in
America a recrudescence of nebulous ideals which a younger generation was
fast outgrowing because it had passed the wistful stage and was discovering
concrete ways of getting them incarnated in actual institutions. The shock
of war threw us back from this pragmatic work into an emotional bath of these
old ideals. there was even a somewhat rarefied revival of our primative
Yankee boastfulness, the reversion of senility to that republican childhood
when we expected the whole world to copy our republican institutions. We
amusingly ignored the fact that it was just that Imperial German regime, to
whom we are to teach the art of self-government, which our own Federal
structure, with its executive irresponsible in foreign policy and with its
absence of parlimentary control, most resembles. And we are missing the
exquisite irony of the unaffected homage paid by the American democratic
intellectuals to the last and most detested of Britain's tory premiers as
the representative of a "liberal" ally, as well as the irony of the selection
of the best hated of America's bourbon "old guard" as the missionary of
American democracy to Russia.5

The intellectual state that could produce such things is one where reversion
has taken place to more primative ways of thinking. Simple syllogisms are
substituted for analysis, things are known by their labels, our heart's
desire dictates what we shall see. The American intellectual class, having
failed to make the higher synthesis, regresses to ideas that can issue in
quick, simplified action. Thought becomes any easy rationalization of what
is actually going on or what is to happen inevitably tomorrow. It is true
that certain groups did rationalize their colonialism and attach the doctrine
of the inevitability of British seapower to the doctrine of a League of Peace.
But this agile resolution of the mental conflict did not become a higher
synthesis, to be creatively developed. It gradually merged into a justification
for our going to war. It petrified into a dogma to be propagated. Criticism
flagged and emotional propaganda began. Most of the socialists, the college
professors and the practitioners of literature, however, have not even reached
this high-water mark of synthesis. Their mental conflicts have been resolved
much more simply. War in the interests of democracy! This was almost the sum
of their philosophy. The primative idea to which they regressed became almost
insensibly translated into a craving for action. War was seen as the crowning
relief of their indecision. At last action, irresponsibility, the end of
anxious and torturing attempts to reconcile peace-ideals with the drag of the
world towards Hell. An end to the pain of trying to adjust the facts to what
they ought to be! Let us consecrate the facts as ideal! Let us join the
greased slide towards war! The momentum increased. Hesitations, ironies,
consciences, considerations, - all were drowned in the elemental blare of
doing something aggressive, colossal. The new-found Sabbath "peacefulness
of being at war"! The thankfulness with which so many intellectuals lay
down and floated with the current betrays the hesitation and suspense
through which they had been. The American university is a brisk and happy
place these days. Simple, unquestioning action has superseded the knots of
thought. The thinker dances with reality.

With how many of the acceptors of war has it been mostly a dread of
intellectual suspense? It is a mistake to suppose that intellectuality
necessarily makes for suspended judgments. The intellect craves certitude.
It takes effort to keep it supple and pliable. In a time of danger and
disaster we jump desperately for some dogma to cling to. The time comes,
if we try to hold out, when our nerves are sick with fatigue, and we seize
in a great healing wave of release some doctrine that can immediately be
translated into action. Neutrality meant suspense, and so it became the
object of loathing to frayed nerves. The vital myth of the League of Peace
provides a dogma to jump to. With war the world becomes motor again and
speculation is brushed aside like cobwebs. The blessed emotion of self-defense
intervenes too, which focused millions in Europe. A few keep up a critical
pose after war is begun, but since they usually advise action which is in
one-to-one correspondence with what the mass is already doing, their
criticism is little more than a rationalization of the common emotional drive.

The results of war on the intellectual class are already apparent. Their
thought becomes little more than a description and justification of what is
going on. They turn upon any rash one who continues idly to speculate. Once
the war is on, the conviction spreads that individual thought is helpless,
that the only way one can count is as a cog in the great wheel. There is no
good holding back. We are told to dry our unnoticed and ineffective tears and
plunge into the great work. Not only is everyone forced into line, but the
new certitude becomes idealized. It is a noble realism which opposes itself
to futile obstruction and the cowardly refusal to face facts. This realistic
boast is so loud and sonorous that one wonders whether realism is always a
stern and intelligent grappling with realities. May it not be sometimes a
mere surrender to the actual, an abdication of the ideal through a sheer
fatigue from intellectual suspense? The pacifist is roundly scolded for
refusing to face the facts, and for retiring into his own world of
sentimental desire. But is the realist, who refuses to challenge or criticise
facts, entitled to any more credit than that which comes from following the
line of least resistance? The realist thinks he at least can control events
by linking himself to the forces that are moving. Perhaps he can. But if it
is a question of controlling war, it is difficult to see how the child on
the back of a mad elephant is to be any more effective in stopping the
beast than is the child who tries to stop him from the ground. The
ex-humanitarian, turned realist, sneers at the snobbish neutrality,
colossal conceit, crooked thinking, dazed sensibilities, of those who are
still unable to find any balm of consolation for this war. We manufacture
consolations here in America while there are probably not a dozen men
fighting in Europe who did not long ago give up every reason for their
being there except that nobody knew how to get them away.

But the intellectuals whom the crisis has crystalized into an acceptance of
war have put themselves into a terrifying strategic position. It is only on
the craft, in the stream, they say, that one has any chance of controlling
the current forces for liberal purposes. If we obstruct, we surrender all
power for influence. If we responsibly approve, we then retain our power
for guiding. We will be listened to as responsible thinkers, while those
who obstucted the coming of war have committed intellectual suicide and shall
be cast into outer darkness. Criticism by the ruling powers will only be
accepted from those intellectuals who are in sympathy with the general
tendency of the war. Well, it is true that they may guide, but if their stream
leads to disaster and the frustration of national life, is their guiding any
more than a preference whether they shall go over the right-hand or the
left-hand side of the precipice? Meanwhile, however, there is comfort on
board. Be with us, they call, or be negligible, irrrelevant. Dissenters
are already excommunicated. Irreconcilable radicals, wringing their hands
among the debris, become the most despicable and impotent of men. There
seems no choice for the intellectual but to join the mass of acceptance.
But again the terrible dilemma arises, - either support what is going on,
in which case you count for nothing because you are swallowed in the mass
and great incalculable forces bear you on; or remain aloof, passively
resistant, in which case you count for nothing because you are outside the
machinery of reality.

Is there no place left then, for the intellectual who cannot yet crystallize,
who does not dread suspense, and is not yet drugged with fatigue? The
American intellectuals, in their preoccupation with reality, seem to have
forgotten that the real enemy is War rather than imperial Germany. There is
work to be done to prevent this war of ours from passing into popular
mythology as a holy crusade. What shall we do with leaders who tell us that
we go to war in moral spotlessness, or who make "democracy" synonymous with
a republican form of government? There is work to be done in still shouting
that all the revolutionary by-products will not justify the war, or make
war anything else than the most noxious complex of all the evils that afflict
men. There must be some to find no consolation whatever, and some to sneer
at those who buy the cheap emotion of sacrifice. There must be some
irreconcilables left who will not even accept the war with walrus tears.
There must be some to call unceasingly for peace, and some to insist that
the terms of settlement shall be not only liberal but democratic. There must
be some intellectuals who are not willing to use the old discredited counters
again and to support a peace which would leave all the old inflammable
materials of armament lying about the world. There must still be opposition
to any contemplated "liberal" world-order founded on military coalitions.
The "irreconcilable" need not be disloyal. He need not even be "impossibilist."
His apathy towards war should take the form of a hightened energy and
enthusiasm for the education, the art, the intrepretation that make for life
in the midst of the world of death. The intellectual who retains his animus
against war will push out more boldly than ever to make his case solid
against it. The old ideals crumble; new ideals must be forged. His mind
will continue to roam widely and ceaselessly. The thing he will fear most
is premature crystallization. If the American intellectual class rivets
itself to a "liberal" philosophy that perpetuates the old errors, there
will then be need for "democrats" whose task will be to divide, confuse,
disturb, keep the intellectual waters constantly in motion to prevent
any such ice from ever forming.

Our Notes:

"Appeal to the Civilized World" was published in October, 1914, by ninety-three
German writers and teachers. In it they defended Germany's war effort and praised
its military establishment.

German general and military historian, Friedrich von Bernhardi, whose 1912 book,
"Germany and the Next War", advocated a war of conquest for Germany. The book
was used for propaganda purposes by the allies.

Campaigning for the Presidency in 1916, Wilson pledged himself to non-intervention
in the war in Europe.

The League to Enforce Peace, organized as a non-partisan group, advocated a
post-war league of nations to employ economic sanctions or military force against any
member waging war.

The references are to Lord Balfour, British Foreign Secretary and former prime
minister, and to Elihu Root. Balfour headed the British war mission to the U.S. in
April 1917. Root was appointed in the same month to head an American mission to
revolutionary Russia.